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Trollope
dans le coma profond
Inscrit le: 04 Oct 2011
Messages: 637
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 Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 1:39 Sujet du message: Kubrick, Kael et Oudart (en français et en anglais) |
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| Citation: | Stanley Strangelove (A Clockwork Orange)
Literal-minded in its sex and brutality, Teutonic in its humor, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange might be the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi Comedy. Is there anything sadder -- and ultimately more repellent -- than a clean-minded pornographer? The numerous rapes and beatings have no ferocity and no sensuality; they're frigidly, pedantically calculated, and because there is no motivating emotion, the viewer may experience them as an indignity and wish to leave. The movie follows the Anthony Burgess novel so closely that the book might have served as the script, yet that thick-skulled German professor may be Dr. Strangelove himself, because the meanings are turned around.
Burgess's 1962 novel is set in a vaguely Socialist future (roughly, the late seventies or early eighties) -- a dreary, routinized England that roving gangs of teen-age thugs terrorize at night. In perceiving the amoral destructive potential of youth gangs, Burgess's ironic fable differs from Orwell's 1984 in a way that already seems prophetically accurate. The novel is narrated by the leader of one of these gangs -- Alex, a conscienceless schoolboy sadist -- and, in a witty, extraordinarily sustained literary conceit, narrated in his own slang (Nadsat, the teen-agers' special dialect). The book is a fast read; Burgess, a composer turned novelist, has an ebullient, musical sense of language, and you pick up the meanings of the strange words as the prose rhythms speed you along. Alex enjoys stealing, stomping, raping, and destroying until he kills a woman and is sent to prison for fourteen years. After serving two, he arranges to get out by submitting to an experiment in conditioning, and he is turned into a moral robot who becomes nauseated at thoughts of sex and violence. Released when he is harmless, he falls prey to his former victims, who beat him and torment him until he attempts suicide. This leads to criticism of the government that robotized him -- turned him into a clockwork orange -- and he is deconditioned, becoming once again a thug, and now at loose and triumphant. The ironies are protean, but Burgess is clearly a humanist; his point of view is that of a Christian horrified by the possibilities of a society turned clockwork orange, in which life is so mechanized that men lose their capacity for moral choice. There seems to be no way in this boring, dehumanizing society for the boys to release their energies except in vandalism and crime; they do what they do as a matter of course. Alex the sadist is as mechanized a creature as Alex the good.
Stanley Kubrick's Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is not so much an expression of how this society has lost its soul as he is a force pitted against the society, and by making the victims of the thugs more repulsive and contemptible than the thugs Kubrick has learned to love the punk sadist. The end is no longer the ironic triumph of a mechanized punk but a real triumph. Alex is the only likable person we see -- his cynical bravado suggests a broad-nosed, working-class Olivier -- more alive than anybody else in the movie, and younger and more attractive, and McDowell plays him exuberantly, with the power and slyness of a young Cagney. Despite what Alex does at the beginning, McDowell makes you root for his foxiness, for his crookedness. For most of the movie, we see him tortured and beaten and humiliated, so when his bold, aggressive punk's nature is restored to him it seems not a joke on all of us but, rather, a victory in which we share, and Kubrick takes an exultant tone. The look in Alex's eyes at the end tells us that he isn't just a mechanized, choiceless sadist but prefers sadism and knows he can get by with it. Far from being a little parable about the dangers of soullessness and the horrors of force, whether employed by individuals against each other or by society in "conditioning," the movie becomes a vindication of Alex, saying that the punk was a free human being and only the good Alex was a robot.
The trick of making the attacked less human than their attackers, so you feel no sympathy for them, is, I think, symptomatic of a new attitude in movies. This attitude says there's no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young 5 punk who says, "Everything's rotten. Why shouldn't I do what I want? They're worse than I am." In the new mood (perhaps movies in their cumulative effect are partly responsible for it), people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims -- that they are dupes and phonies and weaklings. I can't accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassinations, post-Manson mood; I think he's catering to it. I think he wants to dig it. This picture plays with violence in an intellectually seductive way. And though it has no depth, it's done in such a slow, heavy style that those prepared to like it can treat its puzzling aspects as oracular. It can easily be construed as an ambiguous mystery play, a visionary warning against "the Establishment." There are a million ways to justify identifying with Alex: Alex is fighting repression; he's alone against the system. What he does isn't nearly as bad as what the government does (both in the movie and in the United States now). Why shouldn't he be violent? That's all the Establishment has ever taught him (and us) to be. The point of the book was that we must be as men, that we must be able to take responsibility for what we are. The point of the movie is much more au courant. Kubrick has removed many of the obstacles to our identifying with Alex; the Alex of the book has had his personal habits cleaned up a bit -- his fondness for squishing small animals under his tires, his taste for ten-year-old girls, his beating up of other prisoners, and so on. And Kubrick aids the identification with Alex by small direc- torial choices throughout. The writer whom Alex cripples (Patrick Magee) and the woman he kills are cartoon nasties with upper class accents a mile wide. (Magee has been encouraged to act like a bathetic madman; he seems to be preparing for a career in horror movies.) Burgess gave us society through Alex's eyes, and so the vision was deformed, and Kubrick, carrying over from Dr. Strangelove his joky adolescent view of hypocritical, sexually dirty authority figures and extending it to all adults, has added an extra layer of deformity. The "straight" people are far more twisted than Alex; they seem inhuman and incapable of suffering. He alone suffers. And how he suffers! He's a male Little Nell -- screaming in a straitjacket during the brainwashing; sweet and helpless when rejected by his parents; alone, weeping, on a bridge; beaten, bleed- ing lost in a rainstorm; pounding his head on a floor and crying for death. Kubrick pours on the hearts and flowers; what is done to Alex is far worse than what Alex has done, so society itself can be felt to justify Alex's hoodlumism.
The movie's confusing -- and, finally, corrupt -- morality is not, however, what makes it such an abhorrent viewing experience. It is offensive long before one perceives where it is heading, because it has no shadings. Kubrick, a director with an arctic spirit, is determined to be pornographic, and he has no talent for it. In Los Olvidados, Buñuel showed teen-agers committing horrible brutalities, and even though you had no illusions about their victims -- one, in particular, was a foul old lecher -- you were appalled. Buñuel makes you understand the pornography of brutality: the pornography is in what human beings are capable of doing to other human beings. Kubrick has always been one of the least sensual and least erotic of directors, and his attempts here at phallic humor are like a professor's lead balloons. He tries to work up kicky violent scenes, carefully estranging you from the victims so that you can enjoy the rapes and beatings. But. I think one is more likely to feel cold antipathy toward the movie than horror at the violence -- or enjoyment of it, either.
Kubrick's martinet control is obvious in the terrible performances he gets from everybody but McDowell, and in the inexorable pacing. The film has a distinctive style of estrangement: gloating closeups, bright, hard-edge, third-degree lighting, and abnormally loud voices. It's a style, all right -- the movie doesn't look like other movies, or sound like them -- but it's a leering, portentous style. After the balletic brawling of the teen-age gangs, with bodies flying as in a Westem saloon fight, and after the gang-bang of the writer's wife and an orgy in speeded-up motion, you're primed for more action, but you're left stranded in the prison sections, trying to find some humor in tired schoolboy jokes about a Hitlerian guard. The movie retains a little of the slangy Nadsat but none of the fast rhythms of Burgess's prose, and so the dialect seems much more arch than it does in the book. Many of the dialogue sequences go on and on, into a stupor of inactivity. Kubrick seems infatuated with the hypnotic possibilities of static setups; at times you feel as if you were trapped in front of the frames of a comic strip for a numbing ten minutes per frame. When Alex's correctional officer visits his home and he and Alex sit on a bed, the camera sits on the two of them. When Alex comes home from prison, his parents and the lodger who has displaced him are in the living room; Alex appeals to his seated, unloving parents for an inert eternity. Long after we've got the point, the composi- composition is still telling us to appreciate its cleverness. This ponderous technique is hardly leavened by the structural use of classical music to characterize the sequences; each sequence is scored to Purcell (synthesized on a Moog), Rossini, or Beethoven, while Elgar and others are used for brief satiric effects. In the book, the doctor who has devised the conditioning treatment explains why the horror images used in it are set to music: "It's a useful emotional heightener." But the whole damned movie is heightened this way; yes, the music is effective, but the effect is self-important. When I pass a newsstand and see the saintly, bearded, intellectual Kubrick on the cover of Saturday Review, I wonder: Do people notice things like the way Kubrick cuts to the rival teen-age gang before Alex and his hoods arrive to fight them, just so we can have the pleasure of watching that gang strip the struggling girl they mean to rape? Alex's voice is on the track announcing his arrival, but Kubrick can't wait for Alex to arrive, because then he couldn't show us as much. That girl is stripped for our benefit; it's the purest exploitation. Yet this film lusts for greatness, and I'm not sure that Kubrick knows how to make simple movies anymore, or that he cares to, either. I don't know how consciously he has thrown this film to youth; maybe he's more of a showman than he lets on -- a lucky showman with opportunism built into the cells of his body. The film can work at a pop-fantasy level for a young audience already prepared to accept Alex's view of the society, ready to believe that that's how it is.
At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact de- sensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films -- the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don't use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us -- that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality. Actually, those who believe in censorship are primarily concerned with sex, and they generally worry about violence only when it's eroticized. This means that practically no one raises the issue of the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality. Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it's worth some anxiety. We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what's in it. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience? |
Dernière édition par Trollope le Lun Sep 17, 2012 21:06; édité 3 fois |
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Trollope
dans le coma profond
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 2:20 Sujet du message: |
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| Citation: | Kubrick's Gilded Age (Barry Lyndon)
Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, from Thackeray's novel, is very deliberate, very smooth—cool pastel landscapes with small figures in the foreground, a stately tour of European high life in the mid-eighteenth century. The images are fastidiously delicate in the inexpressive, peculiarly chilly manner of the English painters of the period, and the film is breathtaking at first as we wait to see what will develop inside the pastoral loveliness. An early bit of sex play between Barry (Ryan O'Neal) and his teasing cousin Nora (Gay Hamilton) is weighted as if the fate of nations hung on it. While we're still in a puzzled, anticipatory mood, this hushed atmosphere is intriguing, but then we begin to wonder how long it will take for the film to get its motor going. Thackeray wrote a skittish, fast-moving parody of romantic, sentimental writing. It was about the adventures of an Irish knave who used British hypocrisy for leverage; unscrupulous, he was blessed and cursed with too lively an imagination. However, it must have been Barry's ruthless pursuit of wealth and social position rather than his spirit that attracted Kubrick. The director may also have been drawn to the novel because of its externalized approach; Orwell was describing Thackeray's gift for farce when he said that one of Thackeray's heroes was "as flat as an icon." Kubrick picks up on that flatness for his own purposes and tells the story very formally. After an hour or so, Barry has deserted the British Army, only to be impressed into the Prussian Army and then into service as a police spy in Berlin, and we have begun to long for a few characters as a diversion from the relentless procession of impeccable, museum-piece compositions. All we get is Patrick Magee, encased in the makeup of a noble in the time of George III and wearing an eye patch, as the gambling Irishman that Barry is sent to spy on. The two of them head for the Prussian border, to begin a cardsharp partnership that will keep them travelling, and, with Barry at last a free man, the mood could lighten. It doesn't. O'Neal looks slack-faced and phlegmatic—exhausted from the effort of not acting—and one gets the feeling that Kubrick is too good for a light mood. Instead, in Spa, Belgium, Barry sets his sights on the rich, walking-doormat countess he will marry, and the film's color fades ominously to a colder tone. This ice pack, coming at the end of the first half, warns us that in the second half there will be none of the gusto we haven't had anyway.
As it becomes apparent that we are to sit and admire the lingering tableaux, we feel trapped. It's not merely that Kubrick isn't releasing the actors' energies or the story's exuberance but that he's deliberately holding the energy level down. He sets up his shots peerlessly, and can't let go of them. There are scenes, such as the card-room argument between Barry and the gouty old Sir Charles Lyndon (Frank Middlemass), that just sit there on the screen, obsessively, embarrassingly. Kubrick has worked them out visually, but dramatically they're hopeless. He has written his own screenplay, and the film lacks the tensions and conflicting temperaments that energized some of his earlier work and gave it jazzy undercurrents. Has he been schooling himself in late Dreyer and Bresson and
Rossellini, and is he trying to turn Thackeray's picaresque entertainment into a religious exercise? His tone here is unexpectedly holy. The dialogue, taken from the book, is too light to support this, so, right from the start, there's a discrepancy between what the characters are saying and the film's air of consecration. If you were to cut the jokes and cheerfulness out of the film Tom Jones and run it in slow motion, you'd have something very close to Barry Lyndon. Kubrick has taken a quick-witted story, full of vaudeville turns (Thackeray wrote it as a serial, under the pseudonym George Fitz-Boodle), and he's controlled it so meticulously that he's drained the blood out of it. The movie isn't quite the rise and fall of a flamboyant rakehell, because Kubrick doesn't believe in funning around. We never actually see Barry have a frisky, high time, and even when he's still a love-smitten chump, trying to act the gallant and fighting a foolish duel, Kubrick doesn't want us to take a shine to him. Kubrick disapproves of his protagonist. But it's more than that. He won't let Barry come to life, because he's reaching for a truth that he thinks lies beyond dramatization. And he thinks he can get it by photographing externals.
The film says that all mankind is corrupt. By Kubrick's insistence that this is a piece of wisdom that must be treated with Jansenist austerity and by his consequent refusal to entertain us, or even to involve us, he has made one of the vainest of all movies. He suppresses most of the active elements that make movies pleasurable; he must believe that his perfectionism about the look and sound of Barry Lyndon is what will make it great. It's a coffee-table movie; we might as well be at a three-hour slide show for art-history majors.
Ryan O'Neal has worked on his Irish lilt, he knows his lines, he's all psyched up for the assignment, his face straining with the effort to be what the Master wants—and all that Kubrick wants is to use him as a puppet. As Lady Lyndon, Marisa Berenson is just a doll to hang the lavish costumes on; her hairdos change more often than her expressions. In Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell brought his own vitality and instinct to the bullying hero; here Kubrick manipulates the actors the way he did in 2001. The men are country bumpkins or overbred and ugly (they're treated rather like the writer—Patrick Magee—in Clockwork); the women, long-necked and high-breasted, are lovely, but they're no more than the camera's passing fancies. Kubrick doesn't want characterizations from the actors. It's his picture, in the same sense that Fellini's pictures have become his. Where Fellini, the caricaturist, hypercharges his people, makes them part of his world by making them grotesque, superabundant, Kubrick, the photographer, turns actors into pieces of furniture.
Even the action sequences in Barry Lyndon aren't meant to be exciting; they're meant only to be visually exciting. But when we have no interest in who is fighting a battle, or what the outcome will mean, the action must make an appeal to the senses all by itself, by its graphic entertain us, or even to involve us, he has made one of the vainest of all movies. He suppresses most of the active elements that make movies pleasurable; he must believe that his perfectionism about the look and sound of Barry Lyndon is what will make it great. It's a coffee-table movie; we might as well be at a three-hour slide show for art-history majors.
Ryan O'Neal has worked on his Irish lilt, he knows his lines, he's all psyched up for the assignment, his face straining with the effort to be what the Master wants—and all that Kubrick wants is to use him as a puppet. As Lady Lyndon, Marisa Berenson is just a doll to hang the lavish costumes on; her hairdos change more often than her expressions. In Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell brought his own vitality and instinct to the bullying hero; here Kubrick manipulates the actors the way he did in 2001. The men are country bumpkins or overbred and ugly (they're treated rather like the writer—Patrick Magee—in Clockwork); the women, long-necked and high-breasted, are lovely, but they're no more than the camera's passing fancies. Kubrick doesn't want characterizations from the actors. It's his picture, in the same sense that Fellini's pictures have become his. Where Fellini, the caricaturist, hypercharges his people, makes them part of his world by making them grotesque, superabundant, Kubrick, the photographer, turns actors into pieces of furniture.
Even the action sequences in Barry Lyndon aren't meant to be exciting; they're meant only to be visually exciting. But when we have no interest in who is fighting a battle, or what the outcome will mean, the action must make an appeal to the senses all by itself, by its graphic entertain us, or even to involve us, he has made one of the vainest of all movies. He suppresses most of the active elements that make movies pleasurable; he must believe that his perfectionism about the look and sound of Barry Lyndon is what will make it great. It's a coffee-table movie; we might as well be at a three-hour slide show for art-history majors.
Ryan O'Neal has worked on his Irish lilt, he knows his lines, he's all psyched up for the assignment, his face straining with the effort to be what the Master wants—and all that Kubrick wants is to use him as a puppet. As Lady Lyndon, Marisa Berenson is just a doll to hang the lavish costumes on; her hairdos change more often than her expressions. In Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell brought his own vitality and instinct to the bullying hero; here Kubrick manipulates the actors the way he did in 2001. The men are country bumpkins or overbred and ugly (they're treated rather like the writer—Patrick Magee—in Clockwork); the women, long-necked and high-breasted, are lovely, but they're no more than the camera's passing fancies. Kubrick doesn't want characterizations from the actors. It's his picture, in the same sense that Fellini's pictures have become his. Where Fellini, the caricaturist, hypercharges his people, makes them part of his world by making them grotesque, superabundant, Kubrick, the photographer, turns actors into pieces of furniture.
Even the action sequences in Barry Lyndon aren't meant to be exciting; they're meant only to be visually exciting. But when we have no interest in who is fighting a battle, or what the outcome will mean, the action must make an appeal to the senses all by itself, by its graphic strength and visual-emotional movement. It won't do to have soldiers being moved in patterns just to see what original effects a director can get. When Barry, as a soldier, is in a military skirmish during the Seven Years' War, Kubrick proves that even a battle can be pastel—the British Army's red coats are blanched to a photogenic rosy pink. This aestheticizing touch is symbolic of Kubrick's folly; the soldiers are pink toys—they don't die, they merely fall over. And this isn't used for its satiric potential: there's no comedy in it. The opposing line of soldiers wears lavender-pink cuffs, and that seems to be the reason they're on the field—so we can see the ravishing pinks and greens. Yet there's nothing like the extravagant sensuousness of The Leopard. When Barry is wenching, with his arms around two half-naked bawds, the scene is so statically composed that it's pristine, and when Kubrick looks at the wanly bored Lady Lyndon, palest pink in her bath, and you notice abstractly how her flesh tones blend with the appointments of the bathing salon, all you can say is "Pretty."
War has its own graphic power; we can turn on the TV and be moved by a combat scene in an old movie even if we don't know anything about the issues. Obviously, Stanley Kubrick does not have a gift for sensual fury—he's interested in the contemplative spectacle of war. Yet he's indifferent to the possibilities in the interaction of images and doesn't build his sequences by editing—which is how memorable war sequences are made—so his beautiful images are inert. If they seem like slides (certainly the narrator, Michael Hordern, seems like one of those museum tour- guide machines), it's because they don't do anything for each other. The episode of Barry's entrapment by the sly, grinning Prussian officer (Hardy Kruger), which is hammily obvious anyway, is so laborious because Kubrick spells it out instead of making the point by editing. The sequences of the gambling partnership might have been entertaining if they'd been telescoped, like Welles' account of Charles Foster Kane's first marriage.
But Kubrick's mode in this film is oracular and doomy: the narrator tells you what's going to happen before you see it—you're even told long in advance that the end is going to be unhappy. The music, off-puttingly classical under the titles (an omen of a consequential film), gets to be enough to make one want to fight back. What with the marches, dirges, and adagios, there's so much foreboding and afterboding that the music might as well be embalming fluid. Kubrick is doing the opposite of what the revolutionary Russian directors of the late teens and early twenties were attempting: he's going back to the pageant—to using film as a procession of images. And he's going back to impressing people by the magnificence of what is photographed; he's taking pictures of art objects. That antiques- filled room at the end of 2001 must have been where he wanted his own time machine to land. Kubrick seems overwhelmed by the cool splendor of the great manor houses, with their rich interiors and sweeping vistas. The people are repulsively corrupt, but the style in which they live is treated with reverential longing. He simply thinks they're the wrong people to be living there. The star of the picture is the aristocratic domicile.
The misanthropy is right on the surface. Kubrick makes no attempt to hide it; he thinks too highly of it. The few amiable characters—Captain Grogan (Godfrey Quigley) and the compliant German girl (Diana Koerner)—are dispatched quickly. Kubrick is on a hanging-judge trip. When he lets Barry's son, Brian, have sparkling, gamin eyes, you can guess that he's going to kill the kid off and make us suffer. He takes forever over the boy's dying, though at last, in the deathbed scene, Ryan O'Neal, telling the child a terminal tale, gets his one chance to do a Ryan O'Neal specialty: he smiles through tears marvellously. If Irving Thalberg had hired Antonioni to direct Marie Antoinette, it might have come out like this film—grayish powdered wigs and curdled faces. Some people may go along with it, because it is beautiful—if you like chilly fragility. And, since it's essentially a bloodless, elongated version of a thirties costume picture, it could have a camp appeal. One's response will probably depend on one's tolerance for the Kubrick message that people are disgusting but things are lovely. The trend in Kubrick's work has been toward dehumanization, and when Barry and Lady Lyndon have their dry-as-dust courtship and then a wedding that is so lifeless it could be a frozen image, Kubrick seems to have reached his goal: the marriage of robots.
This film is a masterpiece in every insignificant detail. Kubrick isn't taking pictures in order to make movies, he's making movies in order to take pictures. Barry Lyndon indicates that Kubrick is thinking through his camera, and that's not really how good movies get made—though it's what gives them their dynamism, if a director puts the images together vivifyingly, for an emotional impact. I wish Stanley Kubrick would come home to this country to make movies again, working fast on modern subjects—maybe even doing something tacky, for the hell of it. There was more film art in his early The Killing than there is in Barry Lyndon, and you didn't feel older when you came out of it. Orwell also said of Thackeray that his characteristic flavor is "the flavor of burlesque, of a world where no one is good and nothing is serious." For Kubrick, everything has become serious. The way he's been working, in self-willed isolation, with each film consuming years of anxiety, there's no ground between masterpiece and failure. And the pressure shows. There must be some reason that, in a film dealing with a licentious man in a licentious time, the only carnality—indeed, the only strong emotion—is in Barry's brutally caning his stepson. When a director gets to the point where the one emotion he shows is morally and physically ugly, maybe he ought to knock off on the big, inviolable endeavors. |
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Mystère Orange
dans le coma profond
Inscrit le: 11 Fév 2010
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 3:20 Sujet du message: |
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| Fuck les tartines de texte en anglais. |
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Trollope
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 3:24 Sujet du message: |
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| Mystère Orange a écrit: | | Fuck les tartines de texte en anglais. |
Le principe, je pense, c'est qu'on est pas obligé de les lire. C'est très rébarbatif à lire, cela dit, c'est vrai, mais si un jour quelqu'un s'ennuie vraiment... Je sais par exemple qu'on trouve la critique d'Orange Mécanique sur le web (en anglais). Celle de Barry Lyndon, sans doute. Eh bien tant pis. Dans un accès d'enthousiasme, je m'étais dit que j'aurais bien aimé tomber sur ces textes, donc je les mets, ainsi que le lien où je les ai trouvés , très excitant, j'imagine, si on possède un kindle (j'aimerais bien en avoir un). |
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Mystère Orange
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 3:33 Sujet du message: |
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| Non mais je dis ça c'était juste histoire de faire chier. Le titre du topic m'emmerde plus que son contenu. |
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Trollope
dans le coma profond
Inscrit le: 04 Oct 2011
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 3:39 Sujet du message: |
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| Mystère Orange a écrit: | | Non mais je dis ça c'était juste histoire de faire chier. Le titre du topic m'emmerde plus que son contenu. |
ah ? désolé.
ça sonne trop prétentieux ?
Il y a des choses plus importantes  |
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Mystère Orange
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 3:49 Sujet du message: |
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| Trollope a écrit: |
ah ? désolé.
ça sonne trop prétentieux ? |
Disons qu'il n'est pas nécessaire d'être un jeune con pour aimer Kubrick.
Peut-être un peu plus pour titrer un topic comme ça.
Mais y a des choses plus importantes oui (comme ravaler ma mauvaise humeur dans une bonne nuit de sommeil).  |
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Trollope
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 3:57 Sujet du message: |
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| Mystère Orange a écrit: | Disons qu'il n'est pas nécessaire d'être un jeune con pour aimer Kubrick.
Peut-être un peu plus pour titrer un topic comme ça. |
Je ne sais pas... Non? |
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Mystère Orange
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 4:07 Sujet du message: |
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Ben disons que fonder son rejet d'un cinéaste sur l'adhésion qu'il remporte auprès d'une certaine catégorie de spectateurs, je trouve ça plutôt con et puéril oui.
Après ce n'est peut-être pas vraiment ce que tu penses mais c'est ce qui m'apparaît quand je lis ce titre de topic (pas les critiques hein, je ne les ai pas lues, je ne suis pas assez bon en anglais pour me farcir tout ça). |
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Trollope
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 4:11 Sujet du message: |
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| Mystère Orange a écrit: | Ben disons que fonder son rejet d'un cinéaste sur l'adhésion qu'il remporte auprès d'une certaine catégorie de spectateurs, je trouve ça plutôt con et puéril oui.
Après ce n'est peut-être pas vraiment ce que tu penses mais c'est ce qui m'apparaît quand je lis ce titre de topic (pas les critiques hein, je ne les ai pas lues, je ne suis pas assez bon en anglais pour me farcir tout ça). |
Ce n'est pas vraiment ce à quoi je faisais allusion, mais puisque tu abordes aussi directement le sujet, je dirais que je fonctionne comme ça en fait, mais tant pis 
(même si c'est sans doute un peu plus compliqué que ça quand même) |
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Mystère Orange
dans le coma profond
Inscrit le: 11 Fév 2010
Messages: 486
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 4:16 Sujet du message: |
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| Trollope a écrit: |
Ce n'est pas vraiment ce à quoi je faisais allusion, mais puisque tu abordes aussi directement le sujet, je dirais que je fonctionne comme ça en fait, mais tant pis |
C'est déjà bien de l'admettre.  |
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Trollope
dans le coma profond
Inscrit le: 04 Oct 2011
Messages: 637
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 4:23 Sujet du message: |
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| Mystère Orange a écrit: | | Trollope a écrit: |
Ce n'est pas vraiment ce à quoi je faisais allusion, mais puisque tu abordes aussi directement le sujet, je dirais que je fonctionne comme ça en fait, mais tant pis |
C'est déjà bien de l'admettre. |
sauf que ça n'est pas du tout puéril comme posture, mais il se fait tard et ça serait trop long à expliquer (j'en serais incapable - en fait). |
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Trollope
dans le coma profond
Inscrit le: 04 Oct 2011
Messages: 637
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 5:14 Sujet du message: |
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Version courte:
| Citation: | A Clockwork Orange
This Stanley Kubrick film might be the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi comedy. The movie is adapted from Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel, which is set in a vaguely socialist future of the late 70s or early 80s-a dreary, routinized England that roving gangs of teenage thugs terrorize at night. In this dehumanizing society, there seems to be no way for the boys to release their energies except in vandalism and crime. The protagonist, Alex (Malcolm McDowell), is the leader of one of these gangs; he's a conscienceless schoolboy sadist who enjoys stealing, stomping, raping, and destroying, until he kills a woman and is sent to prison. There he is conditioned into a moral robot who becomes nauseated by thoughts of sex and violence. Burgess wrote an ironic fable about a future in which men lose their capacity for moral choice. Kubrick, however, gives us an Alex who is more alive than anybody else in the movie, and younger and more attractive, and McDowell plays him exuberantly, with power and slyness. So at the end, when Alex's bold, aggressive, punk's nature is restored to him, it seems not a joke on all of us (as it does in the book) but, rather, a victory in which we share, and Kubrick takes an exultant tone. Along the way, Alex has been set apart as the hero by making his victims less human than he; the picture plays with violence in an intellectually seductive way-Alex's victims are twisted and incapable of suffering. Kubrick carefully estranges us from these victims so that we can enjoy the rapes and beatings. Alex alone suffers. And how he suffers! He's a male Little Nell-screaming in a strait jacket during the brainwashing; sweet and helpless when rejected by his parents; alone, weeping, on a bridge; beaten, bleeding, lost in a rainstorm; pounding his head on a floor and crying for death. Kubrick pours on the hearts and flowers; what is done to Alex is far worse than what Alex has done, so society itself can be felt to justify Alex's hoodlumism.
Barry Lyndon
Thackeray wrote a skittish, fast-moving parody of romantic, sentimental writing. It was about the adventures of an Irish knave who used British hypocrisy for leverage. However, it must have been Barry Lyndon's ruthless pursuit of wealth and social position rather than his spirit that attracted Stanley Kubrick. His images are fastidiously delicate in the inexpressive, peculiarly chilly manner of the English painters of the period-the mid-18th century-and it's an ice-pack of a movie, a masterpiece in every insignificant detail. Kubrick suppresses most of the active elements that make movies pleasurable. The film says that people are disgusting but things are lovely. And a narrator (Sir Michael Hordern) tells you what's going to happen before you see it. It's a coffee-table movie; the stately tour of European high life is like a three-hour slide show for art-history majors. |
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kleber
dans le coma profond
Inscrit le: 07 Nov 2010
Messages: 212
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 5:23 Sujet du message: |
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JPO tel qu'en lui-même :
(Cahiers, #293) |
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Bicéphale
Inscrit le: 26 Oct 2010
Messages: 80
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| Posté le: Mar Juil 10, 2012 11:26 Sujet du message: Re: Fuck Kubrick (Si des jeunes gens tombent sur ce forum, ç |
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| Trollope a écrit: | | Stanley Strangelove (A Clockwork Orange) |
Je connaissais pas Kael. Voilà que je la découvre avec cet article. C'est sacrément con. Et puant. Rien que cette phrase : "In perceiving the amoral destructive potential of youth gangs, Burgess's ironic fable differs from Orwell's 1984 in a way that already seems prophetically accurate." (je traduis : "En reconnaissant le potentiel amoral et destructeur des gangs de jeunes, la fable mordante de Burgess diffère du 1984 d'Orwell, d'une manière qui nous apparait aujourd'hui prophétique") suffit à situer la bonne dame. Elle a compris d'où vient le danger : Orwell, c'est bien mignon, le totalitarisme, toutes ces fariboles, mais les bandes de jeunes, hein ? Faudrait quand même voir à reconnaître les véritables dangers qui menacent l'ordre du monde et la beauté de nos avenues.
Fixette de Kael, les bandes de jeunes, les punks, c'est avec eux qu'elle débute ou presque. Et c'est avec eux qu'elle conclut. Les tous derniers mots de l'article : les "thugs in the audience", "les voyous dans le public" (attention, hein : "thugs", c'est pas rien, on traduira peut-être par "voyous" mais le mot réfère, et ce n'est pas un hasard, aux bandes organisées (fixette, fixette) de voleurs en Inde, connus pour étrangler leurs victimes). Derniers mots de l'article, donc, qui signent et fixent le petit abîme de parano bourgeoise bien concentrée. La menace est partout : Kael, toute seule dans son fauteuil, entourée d'une horde de sauvages qui applaudissent aux méfaits d'Alex sur grand écran, connaît l'Enfer-qui-vient et tient à en témoigner.
On remarquera, pour revenir aux "thugs in the audience" qu'entre le début et la fin de l'article, les bande de jeunes se sont donc stratégiquement diluées en un groupe bien plus large, sans âge déterminé. Alors quoi ? Tous des thugs potentiels ? (faudra-t-il fouiller les gens à l'entrée des cinémas ? leur faire passer un test d'aptitude psychique ? de rectitude morale ?). Manière de signifier aussi que Burgess, en s'en tenant simplement aux plus jeunes d'entre nous, n'avait peut-être pas su voir toute l'ampleur du problème, appréhender l'envergure de la menace....
La société est en danger : Kubrick (symptôme virulent d'une maladie qui ravage l'industrie cinématographique et par conséquent le monde) conjugue absence de valeurs, non-respect des victimes, déni de la responsabilité personnelle, refus du sens (meaning). Beaucoup de crimes pour un seul homme (et autant de totems creux qui régissent encore aujourd'hui la petite arène publique...).
Kael nous le rappelle : à l'époque heureuse où les choses étaient en ordre, Buñuel (et citer Buñuel, ça prouve tout de même la largesse d'esprit de la dame, non ?) savait nous faire "comprendre la pornographie de la brutalité : la pornographie, c'est ce que les êtres humains sont capables de faire à d'autres êtres humains". Au-delà du fait que cette phrase est écrite avec les pieds, on applaudira la hauteur d'analyse : sempiternelle reprise digest, au ras des pâquerettes, d'Hobbes et son "l'homme est un loup pour l'homme".
Kubrick, quant à lui, est un vilain bonhomme qui refuse de travailler à l'édification morale des masses (les "thugs in the audience"), qui refuse de leur apprendre la bienséance, de leur inoculer les valeurs aptes à résister à la vilaine déviance anarcho-criminelle. Tout au contraire, il les séduit, il les charme, il les caresse dans le sens du poil et les pousse au crime.
Bref, c'est la fin des haricots : le cinéma est atteint de dégénérescence morale, la peste se diffuse à chaque nouvelle séance, le monde est tout prêt d'en crever, et personne ne réagit. Y aurait-il un docteur dans la salle ?
En attendant l'arrivée du médecin qui saura régler tout ça d'un coup de savonnette ou de kärcher, Kael en appelle à l'énième retour de l'ordre moral, en nous jouant du petit pipeau dissonant de la Raison.
Merveilleuse dame.
_________________
"Ne crois même pas que je sois la femme d'Agamemnon" |
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